Announcement of Announcement: Mortimer

as you know, we have a tip bot called PoCCBot. It works, sometimes, when Reddit decides to forward a name mention to its inbox. It has been indicated - several times - that PoCCBot is not just a tip bot.

Henceforth PoCCBot shall be known by the name Mortimer and shall be considered a butler. Mortimer will not be open source. Mortimer looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/TPG6BvL.png

He is older, not so fast, but experienced and reliable. Friendly too.

By the way, it's a graphic made by SKIPPER - paid for in Burst of course - and it is a homage to a program from the early nineties also called "Mortimer", using this butler representation.

Currently planned functionality for Mortimer

tip bot (Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Discourse forum software)

pricing information (coinmarketcap API)

supporting BURST and NXT (not all functionality), maybe others too

mixing service (see below)

exchange (ah - therefore "others too")

bank (wut?)

tba

Oh - really?

Let's start with the mixing service:

Do we really want a mixing service? If anything, it will make some a-holes life easier. Namely those who spent energy getting Burst of other people by shady means. Now they will go through a mixing service and will be hard to tackle.

This is true, and as the author of the mixing service I will do my best so the funds will not only be hard to tackle, but next to impossible to follow. Why am I doing this? I need to say I really despise people who scam others and if there was a way to prevent them specifically from using the mixing service, I would do so. Sadly, there isn't. My original plan to filter out some source addresses, such as the infamous "H" or "Kraxor" and the like has proven to be futile, because I will not be able to watch the bot 24/7 and even if I put a filter in place, said scum will simply transfer from a monitored address to another address, maybe even perform some slight perturbation on their own and then flush it through the mixer.

I really believe we need to prepare ourselves for a more hostile environment in which governments will tighten the thumbscrews on crypto in an increasingly desperate effort to save their fiat. If you haven't read yet /u/nixops excellent article (https://medium.com/swlh/energy-efficiency-and-security-b2b7222988df) on Medium, I suggest you do. Would you really mine Burst if the government of the country you lived in could put you into jail for it? Are you that brave? Would you welcome the opportunity to cover your tracks in such an environment?

Some cryptos, such as Dash, call themselves anonymous cryptocurrencies, when all they have done for anonymity is a built in coin mixer in the wallet. I believe Burst can and should achieve that level of anonymity too with Mortimer.

The PoCC and other devs will continue to make Burst more safe from phishing, scamming and other attacks, so these will not happen in the 1st place. Support for hardware ledgers, and maybe even a bank vault service.

Last but not least: If I won't do it - someone else will. IIRC there was already some simple mixer by Burstnation in pre-MultiOut times.

You add an encrypted message to that transaction with the commands for that bot. If that message is not encrypted, or if there is no message, the mixing will not happen, your funds are forfeited. I consider to simply send the funds back to the originating address - sans some fee - on errors. When I have time to implement safeguards against fuckups of other people.

So you sent a tx with an encrypted message. What needs to be in that encrypted message? For now, simply

OUT: <adr1>, <adr2>, <adr3>, ...

so basically "OUT:" followed by a comma/space separated list of target addresses where the remaining funds (sent funds - fees) will land. e.g.

as you can see, I tried to make the parser somewhat tolerant, you can use comma, or space, or comma and space and you can have addresses with or without the BURST- prefix.

what will happen, after some time, that on the addresses you have specified the remaining funds will appear. In the case above, I sent 50 Burst to that address and it will distribute 39.2 Burst on the 3 addresses above. But shhhh - you don't know that. In order for the mixer to be effective, you obviously should take care of the following things:

never tell anyone the addresses in that encrypted message

make sure they are empty/new i.e. without any transaction history

they have NO PUBKEY associated with them, because the mixing addresses have neither

that you have time. Even after the funds have arrived on your target addresses, do not withdraw them immediately

Love it! Great work! Is 2% about the typical mixing fee for other cryptos? I've never used a mixer, but just seems expensive to me personally. But if that's the same or less than typical mixing fees, that's awesome. I guess I've never -needed- a mixer. If I needed one, 2% is probably worth it I guess... answered my own question?

Why Mortimer is not smiling??!! You will not succeed if don't use smiling people. It is well known in marketing. Make Mortimer to smile. Nobody cares about technology and using coin, more attention to marketing (irony) .

2. I really believe we need to prepare ourselves for a more hostile environment in which governments will tighten the thumbscrews on crypto in an increasingly desperate effort to save their fiat.

I totally agree and i believe we will have more hostile environment. Sadly crisis is coming and governments will need to find that to blame, so more restrictions, taxes, control will be added. Now China is turning back to komunizm, tracks it's citizens (social points!) and all world will be less free ( look to EU ...)

One off main points of public blockchain is censorship resistance, so more we have it, it is better (sure always there are tradeoffs)

Anonymous transactions off-chain. This is an on-chain mechanism. If you had an opened DL and performed there anonymous transactions, no one would know ex-post who did what transaction, but upon closing the DL (clearing), all participants would be like in a fish bowl.

Well smart contracts, especially the Turing-complete kind we have can be used for all sorts of things, also a mixer. It may certainly be that in the long run AT-based mixing services will replace what is offered here. But I wouldn't rely on that before end of 2019. So in the mean time we'll have at least "something".

Which is - as I mention in the text - as big as e.g. the Dash "something".

Burst is a revolutionary cryptocurrency using a unique consensus algorithm called Proof of Capacity. This allows the mining process to shed exorbitantly priced hardware, extreme electricity consumption, and massive amounts of generated heat, while further decentralizing the blockchain by enabling anyone with extra disk space to participate with almost no performance degradation to their machine. By precomputing nonces once and storing them on hard drives each nonce can later be recalled in the mining process.

Burst was the first cryptocurrency to implement turing complete smart contracts and also boasts integrated, escrow services, crowdfunding, messages, and a decentralized asset exchange and marketplace.